Have you been scammed before?

[DXCHASE]

Im not talking trolled or really buying a game and having it be not what you wanted but legitimately been scammed? After my recent incident i wanted to ask if anyone else has been here even as people who are good with seeing a scam etc.

My story: A close friend of mine sent me a link to play a csgo tourny with him, having played with him before (not so much a tourny but grouping up etc.) i trusted and clicked on it (the biggest mistake). I didnt even get to log in or anything so i ignored it.

The next day, about 6-630 last night, i guess someone started sending messages to people from my account. I got a message from someone saying that i had messaged them about a tourny. So i go and look at my friends list and see theres about 10 people that were banned. After unbanning them and talking to them (saying sorry etc.) i saw that they had received a message similar to mine.

None of them clicked it like i did, i didnt really know any of the people that got it so they had no reason to believe it wasnt fake. I then messaged my friend (who also didnt know it was a scam they said) and he began backtracking as well.

So i log out everywhere, change passwords, delete/reinstall authenticator, contacted steam etc. so it seems everything is fine now.

I did notice there was 1 trade made to someone in the time they were sending messages which cost me some skins i had for my csgo guns and some boxes. I didnt lose anything i paid for (those skins were still in my profile), just the skins and boxes that dropped at the end of matches. I luckily sold most of the cases worth money to get mortal kombat and had about 10 others on the market that were still listed (i delisted them and got them back.)

I read that valve/steam dont usually reverse trades so if i wind up not getting anything back im not gonna be too upset but i did get hacked and fell for it and wanted to post this as a cautionary tale and wanted to know if anyone else has that.

 

[ZedClampet]

I've had a couple of people try to start scams on me. Probably because I worked in cybersecurity for so many years, they didn't get very far, and I turned them in to Valve. The first one I stopped immediately. The second one I played along with for awhile in order to collect more screenshots for Valve. That one took awhile to develop, and I wanted to make sure that Valve recognized it was a scam attempt.

I'm not 100 percent immune from stupid clicking though. The other day, for the first time in years, I just absent-mindedly clicked on a pop-up link online and immediately thought, "Oh sh!t! Why did I click that?" Fortunately it wasn't anything.

One of my jobs was to send out fake phishing emails and such, so you I'm usually pretty aware of what I'm doing online.

 

[Pifanjr]

My Twitter got hacked into once and started spamming links, but I didn't actually use it so I only knew because one of my friends pointed it out. I changed my password and haven't had any problems since.

 

[Slasken]

Never been scammed. I did once report the CEO of the company I work for phishing because of the links in the emails he spammed. His links were shortened, and I can't stand that, and I suggest you never click them.

 

[McStabStab]

@DXCHASE I'm sorry that happened to you, scammers are scumbags and even if they don't get money out of you, the time waste is frustrating.

My company has been scammed a few times. We've had checks stolen and cashed, fraudulent checks made in our name, and more recently someone has hacked an accounting person's email, sent out emails saying we're changing our wire transfer info, and then have our clients make payments into fraudulent accounts.

All of course leads to changes in policies, but it just sucks to deal with.

 

[Brian Boru]

Never been personally scammed, mainly thanks to experience gained while being a bit active in anti-spam and anti-scam 20+ years ago. But our little online biz did expose us:

Email Spoofing
Have had plenty of time-wasting tho. What got me into above anti-activities was my and partner's email addresses being spoofed as the FROM address by spammers. Lots of "It wasn't me, here's what's happening" explanations to write

That used to happen ~every 3 months, and last for ~3 days—then spammers would move on to next victim in their list, due to diminishing returns. Running an ecommerce biz, we had to have our email addresses 'out there' so they were easy to grab. Thankfully I haven't had it happen in years, maybe a decade, so either it's been solved or the baddies find social media more profitable.

Credit Card Fraud
Never had a bad experience with this, but it was an ongoing background niggle for over a decade, and one of the reasons we decided a decade ago not to have our own online store in the new company. The financial loss was the least of the problems—around 2% of revenue at worst—the customer service and payment processor companies dealings were the bigger resource eaters.

PayPal
Worth mentioning that I'll always pick the PayPal option when paying for stuff online, and that'll make the diff between otherwise matched retailers. This means my personal info is only with one company, which has been well tested in the hacking fires over the decades.

 

[Zloth]

Never been scammed that way but did get used a lot back when I owned my own IP address. I set it up so everything emailed to the address went to my own email address. So, if I sign up at Acme Coolplace, I could say that my own email address was AcmeCoolplace@myip.org and the emails would all go to me - which meant that, if I started seeing a lot of spam from other companies using AcmeCoolplace@myip.org, I knew exactly who had handed out my name. (My grandparents were the most likely culprits, as they didn't keep their machines or virus scanners updated very well.)

Eventually, though, bulk email places started using the IP to spam. They would mark the email as being from a complete junk address that I never used, probably expecting the return emails to vanish because no such address existed. With the way I set it up, though, they all went directly to me, and I would (literally) get 10,000+ out-of-office emails in one night.

 

[Alm]

I've had my email hacked. I've had my credit card cloned. And I've bought something off ebay that didn't exist. Also leant things to people that were never returned.

Makes you more cynical but I guess that's just losing naivety.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Not yet luckily, closest has been with older family members on social media. Amazing how often some of their accounts get 'hacked', not sure how they manage it .

My Dad almost fell for a Whatsapp scam, someone posing as my sister from an unknown number tried to get him to wire money to them. Luckily he knew by the second message it wasn't her.

 

[Brian Boru]

I've had my email hacked

Main Priority—Protect your Email Account!

People typically undervalue the security importance of their email account, compared to eg bank account and similar.

However… if I get into your email account, I can:

♣ Identify all the main online places you deal with, quite possibly with username info
♦ Try variations of your email username, or identified username, in these places and click on 'Forgot Password'
♥ Enjoy the 'reset password' emails from those sites
♠ Clean you out!

So use a very strong password for your email account, it is a lot more important than it might seem.

 

[Iriiiiinaaaa]

I was recently tricked by a game. Scam game. The point of which is to go to a new level, and to go to a new level you need to find an orange button that turns off the game. It was a test of my nerves. Because I had to restart it 100 times per evening.

 

[ZER0]

I've never been scammed but my father was back in 2013. This is not video game related but it was over Facebook. At the time he had been recovering from a really bad stroke (and the death of my mother a couple years prior) so he was not in a good place. I don't know how it started but it was a woman from another country that was getting him to send money to her. He never talked to her over the phone or over Skype, she would only send pictures so I doubt she was even real. It was difficult because it was hard to convince him that she was just using him, and I think he ended up sending her close to 15,000 dollars.

Needless to say I hate scammers to this day lol.